Doesn’t group care result in negative outcomes?

40 years of research on the Teaching-Family Model suggest that high-quality residential programs have high levels of youth and family engagement and consistently demonstrate positive outcomes.

Most arguments against residential care do not differentiate between poor-quality and high-quality residential care, or even recognize the possibility of quality residential care.

One oft-cited consensus statement argues, “In addition to compromises in virtually every domain of development, including structural and functional brain abnormalities (Nelson, Bos, Funnar & Sonuga-Barke, 2011), young children raised in group settings are especially vulnerable to disturbances of attachment (Nelson, Fox, Zeanah, 2014; Zeanah, 2000).” It should be noted that all three citations studied Romanian orphanages where the “group setting” was characterized by “profound sensory, cognitive, linguistic, and psychosocial deprivation” (Nelson, Bos, Funnar, & Sonuga-Barke, 2011), which obviously does not reflect high-quality residential care like that offered by Teaching-Family Model agencies.